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Posts Tagged ‘Horror’

What is “Existential Horror” exactly? […] As generally used it refers to the horror caused by an idea or entity that threatens not just your personal wellbeing, but your essential conception of the universe and the self. […] As a kind of a cheat sheet:

Being chased by a killer is Terror.

Being chased by a killer robot bent on destroying all of humanity starting with you is Horror.

Discovering that, not only are you being chased by a killer robot, but that it has already exterminated all of humanity centuries ago, and that you are one of the faux-human replicants the killer robot has built and programmed with human memories in order to continue its endless, pointless hunt is Existential Horror.

Is this what Bannon sees? A global scale generational crisis that is going to come to a head in the form of a massive struggle among civilizations? One so large and so bloody that it will leave an enduring mark on the human genome for all time? […] It might be. And here is the hard part — he could well be right.

I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it involved things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

Plus vampire acausal trade bonus: “… they’d acted in perfect sync, knowing that others they’d never met would have worked out the same scenario” (p. 289). — A classic Age of the Basilisk threat structure.

And one more (p.292):

“A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill-set suited to military applications. And it just emerged?”
Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just evolve. Something must have created it.”

Without knowing anything much about what this is going to be (beyond the excerpt here)* it provides an irresistible pretext for citing what has to be among the most gloriously gone texts of modern times, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s response to Roko on the arrival of the Basilisk:

Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2010 05:35:38AM 3 points
One might think that the possibility of CEV punishing people couldn’t possibly be taken seriously enough by anyone to actually motivate them. But in fact one person at SIAI was severely worried by this, to the point of having terrible nightmares, though ve wishes to remain anonymous. I don’t usually talk like this, but I’m going to make an exception for this case.
Listen to me very closely, you idiot.
YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
There’s an obvious equilibrium to this problem where you engage in all positive acausal trades and ignore all attempts at acausal blackmail. Until we have a better worked-out version of TDT and we can prove that formally, it should just be OBVIOUS that you DO NOT THINK ABOUT DISTANT BLACKMAILERS in SUFFICIENT DETAIL that they have a motive toACTUALLY BLACKMAIL YOU.
If there is any part of this acausal trade that is positive-sum and actually worth doing, that is exactly the sort of thing you leave up to an FAI. We probably also have the FAI take actions that cancel out the impact of anyone motivated by true rather than imagined blackmail, so as to obliterate the motive of any superintelligences to engage in blackmail.
Meanwhile I’m banning this post so that it doesn’t (a) give people horrible nightmares and (b) give distant superintelligences a motive to follow through on blackmail against people dumb enough to think about them in sufficient detail, though, thankfully, I doubt anyone dumb enough to do this knows the sufficient detail. (I’m not sure I know the sufficient detail.)
You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends. This post was STUPID.
(For those who have no idea why I’m using capital letters for something that just sounds like a random crazy idea, and worry that it means I’m as crazy as Roko, the gist of it was that he just did something that potentially gives superintelligences an increased motive to do extremely evil things in an attempt to blackmail us. It is the sort of thing you want to be EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE about NOT DOING.)

The affect is strong, or simulated with bizarre brilliance. It almost reaches an intensity capable of burning through time and worm-holing into acausal or horroristic communion with this (plus). Which would suggest that the abominable coupling in question is not without occult connective threads (and not for the first time). All the darkness connects around the back.

We were somewhere near here before. (Bryce went further and then — coincidentally — disappeared, taking his records with him.)

The XS command-core has been shifted to NZ for a couple of weeks. Sense already is that Yule-effects could turn time quite ragged somewhat earlier than expected … so I won’t be fighting the fragmentation. Any ‘stay-on-topic’ rules for comments are hereby lifted for the interim, because the topic is likely to be dismantled, blurry, and soaked in alcohol.

Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World (2015), at IMDb. Here’s a short trailer.

It seems like a suitable frightday night topic — the film impressively conveys the role of raw terror in producing these images. ‘Perinatal trauma’ according to one voice, although that attains very limited purchase on Giger’s ‘biomechanoid’ obsessions. While biography and psychology are dubious guides into cultural products, the account of the young Giger’s horrified fascination with a museum mummy is highly engaging.

All my problems with Giger come from the surrealism — an aesthetic posture to be rigorously damned as facile. If that level of his work is considered a mere vehicle for more profound (or abstract) inclinations, much remains to explore. The movie explicitly describes his work as a gateway into the dark (nigredo), docked to hermetic traditions. Giger’s techno-prosthetically mummified Egyptian princess manifestly draws him into the crypt of transcendental time.

It’s utter degeneracy, of course — but I’m loathe to say that as if it’s a bad thing.